


Miles to Go

by LittleRaven



Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959), Twisted Princesses - Jeftoon01
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Canon Het Relationship, Character Study, Dark, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Eye Trauma, F/M, Fairy Tale Curses, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Horror, Magical Blinding, Not Gory but the Violence Is Implied, blinding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28462332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Briar Rose knows the woods.
Relationships: Aurora & Fauna & Flora & Merryweather (Disney), Aurora & Maleficent (Disney), Aurora/Phillip (Disney)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Holiday Horror 2020





	Miles to Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChokolatteJedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/gifts).



The woods could be dark and deep enough to lose yourself in, if you didn't know how to walk their paths. Some people were afraid of them, the aunts told Briar Rose, but she needn't be. They were happy in their house, far from such people, and Briar Rose learned to walk through the trees, finding the paths visible only to those who knew where it was safe, where the leaves allowed the sun to pass through. 

This she did always. Briar Rose loved the sun, how it peeked past the green, made the dewdrops on branch leaf and bush leaf shine, and brightened the deep pink of climbing roses, on vines you could find growing wild if you knew the right place to look in. She did it more and more as she grew from girl to willowy woman; it was not fitting, she’d decided, to shut herself in when the woods were so warm and welcoming, particularly when there were so many of them in their little house, and Briar Rose felt her occupation of it become more visible now that there was more of her to fill it. They watched her sometimes, her aunts. They tried to hide it once she realized, and she knew it was because she was growing—they were excited—but she did not see how it could be the same needed watchfulness as when she’d been a babe in need of holding. 

Not that she disliked being held, so long as it was a literal embrace. Those were plentiful in her life, and Briar Rose was thankful for it. Though there were moments when she wondered—moments which increased in quantity with the years—if the world had anyone else for her to hold. Her aunts seemed to have had each other for longer than she’d been alive, and from them she knew other people existed. Was she ever to meet one? Did all of them fear the woods too much to ever enter, to ever breach the solitude in which they lived? Would the birds she sang back to as she walked be her only company outside of her four walls? Could she be content with that?

It was during one of those moments that she found an answer in a sunlit clearing. 

He—for he was a he, the first of his kind in significance to her, if not in chronology—was as graceful as the forest animals, and the sun was far more pleasing on his hair than on any leaf. She had taken his cape and hat, unawares, to play with an owl friend, and he had stepped into the owl’s place as if she had dreamed him. It was the novelty she liked, Briar Rose told herself, yes, chiefly the novelty. 

The why did not matter, for she soon forgot it. What she remembered was time, and how the slow pace of forest life seemed to speed up with him around, until he left and its steadiness settled back around her. Yet not without change. She would meet him again. She would. 

When her aunts told her differently, Briar Rose wept. How could they, having kept her from knowing anyone but themselves, take away the one person she had met on her own? How could they, having taught her to love the woods, take her away from them, to live a life within walls so wide and strong, with so many people, that she might never find her way back to the peace she had always known?

Briar Rose would not go with them. Through the door of her room, she could hear them plan, and share their distress. She was sorry for it; they had loved her, and she still loved them. Yet they were unmoved, and so was she. Her life could not continue in the same fashion as before. That much was apparent, no matter what choices were made now. Had she not been a princess, this foreign Aurora, still she could not have abided sameness. 

Her aunts were fairies. She would have to act soon, for she did not know the extent of their magic. Briar Rose waited until the sounds in the house seemed like fighting, and moved in silence, leaving them to it. Sparks flew outside and into the air. She watched, then turned, heading into the trees. 

Perhaps she could catch up to him. He might be far away, but the forest had always been hers to travel. She doubted it could be his. Though if it was—and he had found her, when no one else had—that made her course of action more just, more correct. It had to be that they would meet again. It must. 

The woods were darker now, under the moon. Briar Rose seldom walked her paths at night, waiting for the sun, but need compelled her, and she saw them made anew in the paler, gentler light. Where it gleamed, she paid far more attention than during the day, looking to the shine for guidance, letting her feet find where to tread among tree roots. She saw flowers of a different sort, white, night-blooming, just as wild as the pink roses the forest had shown her many times. It seemed long ago, as though she were a different person. 

She was Briar Rose. She would find her way. Briar Rose followed the white flowers, her most consistent guides apart from the feel of the ground under her bare feet. Time became measured by the light on every bloom she saw, every step, until she stepped through the trees into a moonlit clearing.

It was empty. Briar Rose leaned against a tree. Her feet ached, but her purpose was unfulfilled. Her fairies could arrive at any moment, enchant her, and she would lose, her efforts fruitless. She must not lose. 

Her shadow lengthened, then split. She turned. It was not her shadow. 

The woman was tall, dressed like nothing she had ever seen. Briar Rose imagined her capable of flowing in and out of any shadow. Perhaps here was another well-suited to the woods, one she hadn’t seen before due to her usual choice of when to leave the little house. 

“Come, child. Sit awhile. You look tired.” The tall woman pointed to the middle of the clearing. There was something there, which had not been. Briar Rose could not recognize it. The moonlight drew her eye to a spike jutting into the air. It seemed to gleam. There was a stool beside it; that, she understood. 

“No thank you, kind stranger.” Her voice was firm. “I am on an errand, and it will not wait.” The light tugged at her eyes, but she would not look. “It would be lovely to talk with you, having known so few others in my life, but what I need is elsewhere.”

“Need? Need? You shall see what the word means. Or not.” The woman’s voice poured out, smooth as her entrance, and Briar Rose could not move. She felt her hand being taken, her feet led. 

She heard the spark hiss towards them before she felt it strike their joined hands. The woman snarled. Briar Rose turned, trance broken. 

“Wait here.” Now it was not a hand, but vines coming out of the trees, vines covered with roses, which bound her. She struggled—the vines squeezed—the thorns pricked. 

They fought, her aunts and this woman of the forest night, lighting up the clearing, burning the white flowers which bloomed under the moon. Briar Rose tried to watch, but the thing in the middle of the clearing pulled her gaze again and again. It shone and shone, perfect in her eyes, until one spark set it ablaze. Only the sharp spike survived, breaking off and landing in the grass. 

She heard a howl. Then silence. Then laughter. 

“Very well. I am not particular about the spinning wheel.”

There was one more burst of light, and the diminishing screams of her aunts. 

The tall woman walked before Briar Rose, between her and the spike, and placed her hand on her chin. “Look here,” she said, “the last thing you will see.” In her other hand, she held a lantern. Briar Rose could see the little lights of her fairies inside. 

“You’ve given me much trouble. Hmm. Perhaps death, or sleep, are a mercy.” She tugged at the sash around Briar Rose’s waist and arms, pulled it through the lantern handle. “Hear me now. You shall have your errand. You may pursue it for as long as you wish.” Her vines tightened around Briar Rose’s arms and legs, her hand back on Briar Rose’s chin, the other approaching fast. “Close your eyes.” Whether instinct or trance, Briar Rose obeyed. 

There was pain. She could not open them again. 

“Find what you are looking for, or call to me. If find yourself wanting to sit awhile, receive the mercy you rejected, I may be inclined to offer it again.” The voice lightened. “Oh, and just for my satisfaction—one must have satisfaction.”

Now a sharp prick at her finger; from the spike, she knew, though she could not know it. 

She could not see to tell if the tall woman was gone, but the only thing she heard for some time were the cries of her fairies at her waist, and her own sobs. Blood wetted her face alongside the tears. Briar Rose let herself sit against the tree as if the vines still squeezed her close. 

A hoot interrupted her. Her owl friend. She hooted back. He draped himself over her shoulder; still wearing the cape, she noticed. The soft fabric brushed across her back. 

“You’re right,” she said softly. ”You’re still here, and so am I.” Her fairies might be able to escape one day. Until then, the owl would be her eyes. Her feet still knew the forest. 

It would guide her. She was Briar Rose, and no matter how dark or how deep the woods, she would find the path. She would meet him again. 

Briar Rose stood, and began to walk.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the use of the phrase "dark and deep" for the woods were both taken by the well-known Robert poem "Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening," reproduced below: 
> 
> Whose woods these are I think I know.   
> His house is in the village though;  
> he will not see me stopping here  
> to watch his woods fill up with snow. 
> 
> My little horse must think it queer  
> to stop without a farmhouse near  
> between the woods and frozen lake  
> the darkest evening of the year. 
> 
> He gives his harness bells a shake   
> to ask if there is some mistake.   
> The only other sound's the sweep  
> of easy wind and downy flake. 
> 
> The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
> but I have promises to keep,  
> and miles to go before I sleep,   
> and miles to go before I sleep.


End file.
